2008-03-31

Spitzer Observing

Schiminovich, Wu, Ben Johnson, and I spent parts of the weekend and today getting ready our Astronomical Observation Requests (AORs) for our large statistical Spitzer (no, not this Spitzer) mid-infrared spectroscopy program of line-emitting galaxies in the SDSS. The idea is to get a statistical sample of visual-selected galaxies, and we use a clever trick of combining many nearby galaxies into tiles that share a peak-up (astrometric) star to get more spectra per hour than we would get with a more straightforward program. What we don't know is which tiles will be observed, because our program is statistical, which means we will get what we get, when we get it, as it is convenient for the Spitzer observation planners.